Superheroes Find New Life on Superhighway / Internet may save the day for comic-book industry

David Lazarus, Chronicle Staff Writer

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4:00 am PST, Monday, January 17, 2000

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Superheroes Find New Life on Superhighway / Internet may save the day for comic-book industry

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As a kid, Stephen Rice avidly followed the comic-book adventures of the X-Men, Daredevil and Captain America.

Today, this San Francisco artist is the creator of his own characters -- unpredictable, occasionally murderous beings like the Infidel, the Spook and the Hunger.

But Rice, 32, doesn't publish their exploits in traditional comics, where the action flows on paper from panel to panel and page to page. Instead, he is one of a new breed of "graphic novelists" -- storytellers who rely more on pictures than words -- who self-publish their works on the Internet.

"The Web has allowed me to realize my work as I see it in my head -- in full color, with all the effects," Rice said. "And it allows me to get it to people who are interested in seeing it."

With the comic-book industry on the decline -- sales at retail outlets are down about 40 percent since peaking in 1993 -- many in the business believe that the Net represents the greatest potential to attract new audiences since Superman first donned tights and a cape in 1938.

So high are the hopes for the new medium that no less a figure than the venerable Stan Lee -- creator of Spiderman, the X-Men and a host of other classic superheroes -- is launching his own site, StanLee.net, next month with a collection of new, Web-only characters.

"It will be a whole new way of telling stories," he said. "It will be more like minimovies than comic books."

As it stands, even industry leaders like DC Comics and Marvel Comics are struggling to get by.

Roger Fletcher, vice president of Baltimore's Diamond Comic Distributors, which distributes titles for both companies, said comic-book sales have plunged since DC attracted headlines worldwide with its "Death of Superman" story line in '93. (Not to worry -- the Man of Steel didn't really die.)

"There was a precipitous drop after that," Fletcher said. "The past few years have been stagnant."

He noted that the bulk of comic- book purchases nowadays are by male collectors in their late teens and 20s. The industry is desperate, Fletcher said, to recapture the younger readers who were once the mainstay of sales.

The Internet, it's hoped, is the way to reach them. Both DC and Marvel have spiffy Web sites with plenty of information about their respective characters. But neither offers full-length comics online.

One reason, perhaps, is because online comics present numerous challenges -- as well as opportunities -- for spinning yarns.

With the potential for sound and animation, for example, dialogue balloons can give way to actual voices. When Batman clobbers the Riddler, the sound can come over one's PC speakers instead of a big "POW!" filling the screen.

The question is whether the advent of such multimedia effects will enhance the comic-book experience or in some ways diminish an art form that, in printed form, relies heavily on readers' imaginations to fill in the blanks.

"There are definitely some elements of the traditional comic book that you lose online," said Rice, who admitted that part of the attraction of reading comics is "that tangible experience of holding something in your hand."

He also noted that comic sales over the years have been fueled in part by kids and adults amassing collections of favorite characters and titles -- a trend made highly difficult by online publishing.

At the same time, Rice pointed out that Web publishing allows for higher-quality artwork and brighter colors, and creates the potential for new styles and techniques possible only with computer-generated images.

Moreover, the Web allows artists to extend their reach beyond the physical parameters of sheets of paper. "Comic art has always been limited by page structure," Rice said. "With the Web, you're not limited in that way any more."

Even so, he sticks largely to a panel-by-panel format for his story, "The Gifted," which can be viewed at www.thegifted.com. It follows the adventures of a reporter who discovers the existence of four superbeings, with the moral underpinnings of characters left deliberately ambiguous.

Begun in 1996, with new pages posted online intermittently, "The Gifted" has been a labor of love for Rice, who holds a day job as an accountant at a local Internet startup.

"I would love to be at a point where I could do it full time," he said. "But right now I don't have the means."

If anyone can make online comics pay off, it's Stan Lee. The 77- year-old creator of nearly all of Marvel's hottest heroes has come up with a slew of new characters for his Internet venture, which is scheduled to launch on February 29. (The preview pages now show the bad guys but not the good guys.)

While Lee insists that concocting comics for the Net is no different from doing so for the printed page -- "You're trying to come up with characters that will interest the audience and stories that are compelling" -- his new enterprise by no means is dedicated to art for art's sake.

StanLee.net will look to parlay its new-media heroes into old-media revenues, with spin-offs to be quickly sought on TV, in movies and, yes, in printed comic books.

In this way, the company will use the Net as the world's biggest focus group, determining which characters work and which ones don't with a global audience, and then compressing the time a print superhero might take finding his or her way to an animated Saturday-morning cartoon or big-screen thrills.

"We consider ourselves an Internet company that creates branded content," said Peter Paul, the co- founder of StanLee.net, who a background in Hollywood productions and marketing. "But we do not consider ourselves exclusively an Internet company."

By this he means that the bulk of the Encino (Los Angeles County) firm's profits will stem from licensing arrangements with other media as opposed to sales generated online.

Rob Burgess, the chief executive of San Francisco softwaremaker Macromedia, has high hopes for Lee's site. Macromedia has invested $5 million in the venture and is supplying the Flash technology for animating Lee's characters on the Web.

"This is the next step," Burgess said. "The first generation of Web animation was people experimenting with new approaches. When you see Stan Lee's stuff, you say, 'OK, the pros are in.' "

Another San Francisco firm hoping to cash in on transporting comics to the Web is Spunky Productions, which has cut a deal with Harvey Entertainment to bring Richie Rich ("the poor little rich boy") into the Information Age with a series of Web-based cartoons.

The first episode, in which Richie Rich encounters Santa Claus, debuted last month at www.spunkytown.com. It illustrates both the strengths and weaknesses of online animation -- and suggests that comics' transition to the Web may not be as smooth as all that.

While it's a kick to see brightly colored drawings move in one's browser and tell a little story, the sound effects and voices are rather cheesy, and the overall effect is like one of those old Japanese cartoons that kept production values to an absolute minimum.

Lee's new superheroes also will have voices, and when they take on baddies, their capes will go "swish" and their fists will go "blam."

Online comics, it would seem, are striving to be closer to low-rent cartoons than to the illustrated epics that engage the imaginations of readers.

"Which is more fulfilling to people?" asked Karl Kronenberger, president of Spunky Productions. "Is it comics on the Web or full-out animation? I'm a huge believer in comics, but you can convey so much more with animation."

As personal computers grow more powerful, he believes that online animation will become more sophisticated -- which will in turn create a greater divide between traditional comic books and their digital offspring.

"Comics books may be dying," Kronenberger said, "but comics are definitely alive on the Web."

Rice, who is pushing to get his next installment of "The Gifted" online by the end of the month, accepts that Web-based comics are fundamentally different from their paper cousins.

"New media provides new ways of storytelling," he said. "Animation is part of that. Whether that's just a gimmick or whether it enhances the storytelling depends on the storyteller."

But Lee insists that there are elements to comics that will remain constant, no matter where, or how, they appear.

"They're not your everyday stories," he said. "They're bigger than life. People have always loved that since the days of King Kong and Frankenstein. That type of thing will always be popular."